Our panel

About the Panel

Amber Samdahl is the Senior Technical Staff in the Research & Development department at Walt Disney Imagineering. Amber works to create tools, technologies and techniques to tell new stories and create innovative entertainment experiences. Her primary interest remains in developing interactive experiences with a focus in games, social media and play. Amber holds Bachelors Degrees in Computer Science and Film from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Masters degree from Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center.

Scott Rench has spent 20 years launching technology at Disney. He works to launch new technology at parks, resorts and cruise ships. He currently leads the WDP&R New Technology Group (NTG), which is responsible for developing innovative new concepts to improve the guest or cast experience. NTG drives research and develops pilots for a broad spectrum of technology initiatives including mobile computing, digital signage, IPTV, new media, social networking, applications of RFID, multi-touch interfaces, 3D capture & display, and large-scale interactive experiences.

Creating Magic

The Disney Imagineering team is always looking ten years ahead to create seamless technology experiences that shouldn’t feel like technology, no one should notice the underlying technology behind the experience. There area lot of rapid prototyping and several iterations are used to create the magic, this is called play testing.

At the end of the day the thing what Disney Imagineers care about is the story. This story should create an experience for the guest that they can participate in. Planning begins with the story, followed by the technology and then the implementation. This methodology was used to create the Kim Possible adventure. Park visitors are given a cell phone with an RFID tag and are assigned missions from the cell phone. The RFID technology allows them to track when visitors get to the destination and defeat the villain and allows them to set off special effects immersing the guest in the experience. You can now fight villains using this technology in over seven countries now.

Another magical experience discussed was Sorcerers of Magic Kingdom. Park guests help Merlin defeat villains while being trained to become a sorcerer. This game uses playing cards and the technology behind it is able to recognize what spell is being used against the villain based on what card the park visitor plays. No matter how tall or small the park visitor is. They then earn a new card when the villain is defeated by them playing thair cards. You can also play a version of the game using playing cards at home.

Imagineers are empowered. They are expected to try things, fail quick and try the next iteration to keep moving toward the end goal of creating new magic using new technology.

Some interesting Disney trivia:

• Disney has the one of the largest infrastructures for transportation. It is one of the largest people moving systems and it is managed to be a seamless experience to not detract from the magic of Disney theme parks.
• Walt Disney World is 44 square miles of property.

Everyone loves Disney

Women Tech Council members sharing the magic.

Amanda (Mandi) Hudson is a member of the Women Tech Council  and is the Online Marketing Manager at Western Governors University an accredited non-profit online university. Amanda holds a B.S. in Marketing from the University of Utah and an MBA in Information Technology Management from Western Governors University. You can connect with her on Linked In here, follow her blog Online Advertising Geek or interact with her on twitter @AdvertisingGeek.

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The speaker was Kevin Knebl who speaks professionally and advises small, medium and Fortune 500 companies. Kevin is recognized as a LinkedIn subject matter expert and has trained hundreds of organizations and tens of thousands of individuals on the most effective uses of LinkedIn since 2004.  Kevin also has more Recommendations (1000+) on his LinkedIn profile than anyone else in the world among over 115,000,000 LinkedIn users.

In today’s business world you need these three things:

1. A method to build positive relationships
2. A clear and compelling social media presence
3. An understanding of how to best use technology to build, maintain and leverage relationships

LinkedIn like all social media is about building relationships and not on the technology, the technology can’t and won’t make you someone you aren’t. If you work on networking and building relationships sales will happen. All thinks created equal people refer business to people that they know and like.

My two Key LinkedIn Strategies I learned at LinkedIn Boot Camp were:

• Grow your network - Send Kevin Knebl Linked In invitation (http://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinknebl) and let him know you are from the Women Tech Council. You will then have access to his large network which will grow your own network and increase the number of professionals you have access to.
• Linked In is a search engine – Make sure you use keywords related to your skills and expertise so people can fine you. LinkedIn recently added a Skills and Expertise section which enables you to add this information, but make sure keywords are also written into your descriptions. This section is an extra list of keywords you can add to your profile (so you will show up for more results and make more connections).

Add your skills and expertise keywords to your LinkedIn profile.

Some other tips and tricks from Kevin’s presentation:

• Women, use your maiden name – LinkedIn is a database
• Write down every place that you have ever worked (and not been fired from)
• Include all places you went to school including your high school
• Add your LinkedIn profile to your email signature, it is your virtual business card
• You want people to look at your profile, this is a business network
• Make sure you populate your summary
• Write everything in Word and paste over, there isn’t a spell check in LinkedIn

You can watch the recorded presentation here.

Amanda (Mandi) Hudson has been a member of the Women Tech Council for over two years and is the Online Marketing Manager at Western Governors University an accredited non-profit online university. Amanda holds a B.S. in Marketing from the University of Utah and an MBA in Information Technology Management from Western Governors University. You can connect with her on Linked In here, follow her blog Online Advertising Geek or interact with her on twitter @AdvertisingGeek.

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We continue to be inspired by the accomplishments, involvement, mentoring and the network of the community.  Here are some highlights of 2011:

• Presented the 4th Annual Women Tech Awards bringing the total number of women recognized to 65
• Introduced the new Academic Excellence Award which highlights an outstanding university student
• Hosted Spring Networking event – w/VC’s from Pelion and Epic, Carine Clark CMO and SVP Symantec and Lyla Bigelow from the University of Utah
• Continued our successful TechTalk series, with 6 hosted around the state
• Engaged online community across Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn
• Created the foundation for education and mentoring programs in 2012

What’s new in 2012?  We are adding two exciting programs:

• Teen Tech Awards – in partnership with MESA/STEP, Women Tech Council scholarships will be awarded at the Scholarship Awards Banquet in the spring
• WTC Mentoring Program – a new university mentoring program will launch in January.

We are excited to announce some of our new 2012 annual sponsors: ATK, Domo, Tanner, Holland & Hart, and Level 3 Communications.  For the first time ever we have included an Education Sponsor, this includes a $500 scholarship toward our new TeenTech Award.  New Education Sponsors include FatPipe, NelsonLabs, Patent Law Works, and Symantec. A very special thanks to our renewing annual sponsors:  Symantec, Vérité, Grant Thornton, EnergySolutions, Ballard Spahr, MarketStar, eBay, XO Communications, TEKSystems, Durham Jones Pinegar, and XO Marketing.

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Our Host – The Leonardo
We were excited that this year’s holiday social was hosted at the Leonardo, one of our community partners. The Leonardo was decorated beautifully and several members were able to take advantage of a free tour of the museum.

Our Speaker – Kim Hood, Governor’s Cabinet
We always like to look back and reflect on the changes we have experienced as a state and industry at the end of the year. Kim Hood, Executive Director, Department of Administrative Services from the Governor’s Cabinet will shared with us a look back at the state and industry.

Some highlights included:

• Utah is a great place for businesses to be located, based on the cost of doing business and the talent pool available
• Utah is the most inventive state, we are first in generating patents per capita
• Jobs are expanding in all areas in Utah excluding government
• Income has increased by 5%
• Utah has a higher percentage of home computer use than anywhere in America

Our Charity – YWCA
As is tradition, we helped a local charity during the social. We had a money tree for your donations, all donations will go directly to the charity.  Last year we raised more than $2,000 at the social, this year we wanted to pass that amount for the YWCA. For more than 100 years the YWCA Salt Lake City has been a voice for women, a force for change, and a place for hope in Utah. Our enduring belief is that better lives for women–all women–will lead to stronger families and communities. Since opening the first domestic violence crisis shelter in Utah in 1976, the YWCA has developed an integrated range of program primarily in the area of family violence. The YWCA’s programs address a variety of basic, immediate needs for safety, shelter, food, and clothing, as well as longer term needs for affordable housing, quality child care, economic empowerment, racial justice, emotional health, and physical well-being. Today the YWCA is Utah’s oldest, largest, and most comprehensive provider of shelter, transitional housing, education, and supportive services for women and children who have experienced family violence.

Thank you to everyone that attended! It was a great event.

More photos from the event are available on our Facebook page.

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Right now I’m sitting on my couch writing this using my netbook with the tv going and Mythbusters on in the background. I have my receiver switched to AUX where I have my media server (which is hooked up to my TV and surround sound) playing my mp3’s on random. I’m sitting here and I can’t help but be amazed at the technology that surrounds us on a daily basis and how we just completely take it for granted.

When I was a kid I couldn’t fathom a computer as small as my netbook, let alone how powerful my phone is. I would never have thought of hooking a computer to my TV and using it as the monitor. Watching movies by playing a file instead of using some physical media would have been just plain preposterous and the stuff of science fiction. But I’ll tell you something I always knew would stay the same.

When I was a kid I loved having the tv on with the volume off and music playing from the record player/stereo/cd/cassette player instead. Which, in a technologically superior way is what I’m doing right now, I just went about it differently.

That’s how I used to play my Atari, original NES, and later computer games as well. I have long used this means of visual audio combination as a tool to help me create. It gives me something to look at that isn’t what ever I’ve been obsessing over for the last several hours yet doesn’t completely distract me, and I always look forward to those neat little moments where what’s on TV matches up perfectly with the song I’m listening to at the time.

But what does this have to do with you and me and the rest of the world you ask? What does this have to do with Social Media? To state it simply, everything…and nothing. On the superficial level it means nothing. It’s just me talking about the conditions in which I like to create. But lets look at the first part of that answer, the everything part.

I shared a story about how I have been doing the exact same thing that I have done since i was a kid and as new technology came about I just adapted and found newer, easier, and more interactive ways of doing it. This to me is a metaphor for social networking. When we were kids and all the way on up through young adults we had a mandatory way of networking in the form of schools. Meeting people with similar interests at recess, learning from them, exchanging ideas, stories, and media (through cassettes, dvds, comic books, etc).

College was a bit more advanced form of the same thing but we still did it every semester. We sought out people of like interests and shared media (content) with them (who then became our friends) and they exposed us to new stuff and new people and on and on the cycle went.

When you boil it all down what I’m trying to say is that social networking (even social media) isn’t anything new at all, it’s just the next step in how humans connect. For the skeptics out there who are still stubbornly refusing to “jump on the band wagon” quit dragging your heels.

This isn’t something new, it’s just a new way of doing the same thing we’ve been doing since we climbed out of the primordial ooze and started making guttural noises at each other. We’re finding new ways of connecting.

image by dpstyles™

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It seems like a pretty big challenge to take the helm of a newspaper that’s been in business for over one hundred years, especially today, when newspapers are dying right and left. In fact, Gilbert said, almost all “two-newspaper cities” have lost one of those two papers in the last ten years. Since Salt Lake City has two main papers, Gilbert had reason to be concerned for Deseret News’s future.

Surprisingly, the answer to keeping a newspaper alive in the digital age is NOT to “go digital.” At least, not in the traditional way. Gilbert shared lessons he’s learned from the history of disruptive innovations—those inventions that changed the world and led to the downfall of older, entrenched companies—and from the people who couldn’t see that the newer technology would change the future (the president of United Wireless telegraph company rejected the telephone when it was offered to him, for example; main-frame computer manufacturers sneered at the first personal computers to come along).

Gilbert found himself wrestling with how to incorporate a disruptive innovation—in this case, online media—into a traditional newspaper print business. Studying past instances of disruptive innovations taught him that the obvious solutions wouldn’t work. Abandoning the Deseret News paper is not a sound business decision, since the paper is still economically viable; neither does it make sense to force the paper to follow the growth trajectory of Deseret Digital Media. Instead, Gilbert’s studies of good companies that fail convinced him that he had to keep the two business arms separate. “We’ve found ways to give Deseret News a distinctive voice so it will continue being commercially viable,” he said, “while at the same time, we are launching Deseret Digital Media on its own trajectory.”

It’s a business plan that’s worked in the past. Gilbert launched a cutting-edge online teaching system while he was a vice-president at BYU-Idaho. Over years of refining, the program gained higher and higher levels of student approval. Today, the average online class is rated as more successful than the average traditional class. Is there still a place for traditional teaching? Gilbert says there is. In fact, the very top-rated 10% of classes are all traditional. “The online platform is very successful,” he said, “at providing consistently high levels of instruction. But for the most effective instruction, we find that nothing can replace face-to-face teacher-student interaction. So traditional instruction is still very much relevant.”

In much the same way, Gilbert envisions Deseret Digital Media as a usable, practical platform that provides Salt Lake-based news—but there is still a niche for Deseret News to fill.  To keep the newspaper viable, Gilbert publishes longer thought pieces and uses writers who have already developed a loyal following. In other words, he has found a way to combine a traditional business and a disruptive innovation and make them both thrive. We wish him the best!

Amy Chamberlain is the writer and researcher at the School Improvement Network, where she researches the latest educational topics and writes professional development programs for educators. She is interested in the topic of technology in education and in recognizing excellent educators for the work that they do. You can reach her at amy.chamberlain@schoolimprovement.com.

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Social Media is a hot topic these days because it is “new,” but navigating the world of online interactions for your business effectively can certainly be a challenge. Social media offers more than handling business complaints and posting pictures of your favorite grandbaby—it creates opportunities to make real connections with people you may not met before.

Twitter offers a unique opportunity to grow your professional network. Twitter is no longer for the early adopter crowd; it has moved mainstream. Are you a part of it? Twitter is an open network. Unlike Facebook and LinkedIn, you can follow almost anyone you want. (There are some locked accounts, but the majority of people on Twitter leave their feed open.) Because of this, the sky is the limit regarding whom you can meet and interact with.

Is there someone you respect professionally? You have the opportunity to follow him or her and gain insights into how they manage their days and what articles interest them. Twitter doesn’t have to be a play-by-play of the events in your day; you can manage a professional network of actively tweeting and responding to professionals in your field. You have the opportunity to add your voice to the professional discussions going on and create new relationships.

Don’t focus on how many people you are following and how many people follow you. Focus on creating the right relationships. You do need to grow your network enough to enable you to have an interactive conversation. (Following one or two people probably isn’t really going to do the trick.) Just remember, when building your professional network it isn’t a numbers game, it is a quality game.

Social media networking does not replace in-person networking; it enhances it. It gives you an early introduction to the people who will be at the networking events that you attend. Twitter does have a bit of a learning curve, but it’s worth the time it takes to learn Twitter basics.

In fact, contact us at @womentechcncl and get your twitter name added to the Women Tech Council Twitter list that we just started at http://twitter.com/WomenTechCncl/womentechcouncil.

Amanda (Mandi) Hudson has been a member of the Women Tech Council for over two years and is the Online Marketing Manager at Western Governors University an accredited non-profit online university. Amanda holds a B.S. in Marketing from the University of Utah and an MBA in Information Technology Management from Western Governors University. You can connect with her on Linked In here, follow her blog Online Advertising Geek or interact with her on twitter @AdvertisingGeek.

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Carol has an Associate of Arts from Villa Julie College (MD), a Bachelor & Master of Arts from the University of Baltimore.  She has attended Innovation and Leadership Executive Training at The Wharton School of Business.

Carol was named in 2010 by “Utah Business Magazine” as one of “30 Women to Watch in Utah.” She is an advisory member of the Women Tech Council, a member of Association of Information Managers and the SLC CIO Council. Carol serves on the boards of Utah Food Bank Services, chairing the Programs Committee and serves on Board of the Utah Partnership for Education. Recent service includes Rotary Club 24—Youth in Crisis Committee, the Board of First Unitarian Church and Board Member for SIM/Association of Information Managers in Salt Lake City.

EnergySolutions, headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, is an international nuclear services company with operations throughout the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and other countries around the world. With over 5,500 world-class professionals, EnergySolutions  is a world leader in the safe recycling, processing and disposal of nuclear material. EnergySolutions  provides integrated services and solutions to the nuclear industry, the United States Government, the Government of the United Kingdom, hospitals and research facilities.

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In 2003 she was nominated to the Space Technology Hall of Fame for her contribution to the Thiokol Humanitarian De-Mining Flare.  She has been an invited lecturer in solid propellants at the University of Alabama-Huntsville, the Gordon Research Conference, and the AIAA.  Dr. Campbell previously held a position as Program Manager for Science and Engineering Ordnance and Propellant Technology programs. Prior to joining Thiokol Propulsion in 1980, Dr. Campbell was a propellant chemist for Talley Industries of Arizona. She has seven patents and over 20 publications in the field of new solid propellants and ingredients.  Carol is involved in the mentoring program for high-potential young engineers and scientists at ATK.

She supports programs for women in science including the ACCESS program at the University of Utah, and the Northern Utah Chapter of Expanding Your Horizons.  She was a panelist for the 2010 “U of U Celebrating Women Leaders in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math” seminar.  Dr. Campbell earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry from Northern Arizona University (cum laude), and a Doctorate degree in Inorganic Chemistry from Utah State University.  Carol enjoys yoga, snow skiing and snow shoeing, hiking, and bicycling.  She raises and shows American Paint Horses, and is the 2010 President of the Utah Paint Horse Club.

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Laura’s visionary approach to educational technology has led UEN to innovative services such as UEN SciFi Friday and UEN Cheese Science, multi-platform projects that enhance the educational value of broadcast programs to build interest in science.  She was also instrumental in bringing to Utah diverse global perspectives on news and culture with the digital TV channel MHz Worldview, supporting school readiness with the launch of Preschool Pioneer Online Library, helping build the new PBS Digital Learning Library and teaching Internet safety with NetSafe Utah. Laura has presented at the invitation of national groups on strategies to improve education through technology and she partners on several projects with PBS, CPB, museums, schools, and libraries.

Dedicated to improving education through technology, Laura holds a bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts and a master’s degree in Educational Studies, these led to a teaching license in Elementary Education with Technology and Gifted endorsements and a doctorate in Teaching and Learning. Her experience includes public media administration, adjunct professor at the University of Utah, State Office of Education Internet Specialist for Utah, public school teaching, and technology curriculum development.  She lives in Salt Lake City with her husband, Bruce, two accomplished children and two lazy dogs.

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